Archive for March, 2011

The Chairman of the Office of Rites is having a very bad start to his working day. Click to enlarge.

Partly coloured version of the new art for Page 62 of The Rite of Serfdom. The characters are coloured based on the established character continuity. At this point, I am not entirely sure what to do with the colouring for the backgrounds, but they are greytoned anyway. By adding large flat areas of colour that overlap the line art, I can fill up gaps in the line art and keep things manually. It also helps keeping the background more or less consistent and prevents over-colouring.

If I were to colour a page from a completely new comic, the background colours would be more integrated with the character colours, but in these redrawn pages, character continuity has to be maintained, so their skin tones and costumes are coloured first.Original version

Posted in Work: ROCR discussion | Comments Off on Continuity colours for redrawn version of The Rite of Serfdom, page 62

So I heard early in the year that Kate Bush was going to have a new album out, and I'd heard the latest news that it was going to be called The Director's Cut and consist (in its most expansive version) of a combination of remastered versions of her earlier albums The Sensual World and The Red Shoes, and new recordings based on the material from those albums. Naturally, I had an opinion on this, but I was not motivated to write it down for the handful of people still reading here. So I got The Guardian's Graeme Thomson to write it down for me, and he did a good job explaining why a release like this is something to be nearly as eye-bogglingly enthusiastic about as a release consisting of entirely new music. Thanks, Graeme! You took the words right out of my mouth and I didn't even have to pay you a penny! Just one little thing, though: you might have emphasized a little more that there is an unspoken bond of trust between Kate Bush and her fans: she is one of only a few artists you can always trust not to release mere 'product'. We may not consider every single album of hers to be the pinnacle of human musical achievement—after all, there can only be one of those, or two if your name is Kate Bush. But we do all understand that the albums that come out, when they come out, are the albums that had to be made, when they had to be made. There is no unnecessary material in Kate's catalog. And that's something that few artists can say about their past work. I trust that this will still be the case after The Director's Cut lands in our laps.